Sweet Louise gave one more strong push and out slid her newborn lamb, covered in fluid and blood, a sight that would make most people's stomachs churn. I was used to it though. I watched as Sweet Lou began licking her baby clean, as all good sheep mothers do. This was the third time I had witnessed one of my ewes giving birth and the seventh year actually breeding and raising lambs through 4-H. I had been around my sheep so much, feeding morning and night for over half my life, that I recognized each one and picked out silly names for my favorites. Throughout my 4-H involvement I have had anywhere from two to ten sheep living in a cozy barn on my family's two acre property. Baby lambs have been the new addition to the property every winter since I was nine years old.

A couple years into breeding sheep I noticed that the baby lambs looked very similar to their parents. Zip had the same wool pattern on her face as her mom, Lullaby, making both of them look like they had extra chubby cheeks. And Race had the same pinkish color nose as her mom, Rosie. Even the personalities of the parents seemed to be reflected in their lambs. I began to wonder what caused these similarities between parent and offspring. I was discovering a quality of Mendelian Genetics that wasn't introduced in school until the following year.

Once I learned about the science behind what I had observed in my own backyard, I was hooked. In biology class we learned that parents pass genetic traits onto their offspring and compared Punnet Squares, predicting the probability of the offspring's genes with different parent combinations. My interest led me to explore the possibility of studying genetics in college. I chose to conduct research on a degenerative disease called Scrapie, found in lambs with certain DNA sequences that cause susceptibility to infectious protein prions. I presented my findings at UC Davis, receiving a gold medal for my presentation at state level. I brought my new knowledge of genetics to my backyard to improve my flock and began selecting sheep to breed with the qualities I wanted to continue to see. I chose lambs with straighter backs, wider loins, and more correct bone structure over lambs that were not quite as sound, with the intention of improving the market and breed qualities of my flock. After seven years of selecting and breeding sheep in this way, I produced a champion ram and champion ewe that I took to breeding sheep shows all over California. Last summer I bred my ewe, Sweet Louise, with my ram, Watson, in hopes of passing on these champion-worthy genetics. It was Watson and Sweet Lou's offspring that was just about to stand up in the fresh straw on long, shaky legs for the first time, ready to live up to her parent's genes.